This is getting terrifyingly close to my prediction that Microsoft should/would/will buy GitHub. When I first started predicting this two or so years ago, it was mainly for its comedic value (it always got laughs, followed by "yeah, they should!" followed by nervous laughter followed by "wait, do you think they would actually do that?!"), but after the open sourcing of .NET I honestly think anything is possible. Especially because the counter to MSFT buying GitHub was always "but... CodePlex!", and here they are explicitly moving a high-profile project from CodePlex to GitHub. Scary!

Are there any major public repository hosting services that provide good organizational tools for multiple repositories?

GitHub, as far as I have been able to determine, only supports a flat list sorted by last update.

This is annoying when a developer has a lot of repositories. I'll come across something useful in one of my areas of interest from a given developer, and then want to look at their other repositories to see if they have anything else in that area of interest. In a sane design, all of their repositories in that area would be organized under a folder, and this would be easy.

> HOW: This will be a simple switch turn off CodePlex, turn on GitHub. Youll be able to see our check-ins on GitHub that same day.

It's probably a safe bet that CodePlex's days are numbered. Which is kind of a shame. It was definitely heavily lacking but I can't help but think that some more competition in the space would be a good thing.

Perhaps Microsoft wants to divest out of the git+online tools space? Github is the incumbent that they did not crack how to beat and it will be a bit more crowded with Amazon who seems to be also coming this year with CodeCommit. So far, Amazon strategy has been to suck all air from the room.

With Microsoft making moves like these for their open source projects, it seems like network effects are alive and well, and working for GitHub. Of course, it did require some change from above to get to the point where Microsoft is willing to open source this stuff in the first point.

Makes sense to me. I've not met anyone who doesn't think Visual Studio is solid software, and received numerous recommendations that an IDE is definitely something worth paying for. MS looking to be developer friendly can only be good for them.

Microsoft has being doing good decisions lately. They are becoming more open, also integrating more with industry leaders. Another good strategic decision they made was the partnership with Dropbox (https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/11/dropbox-microsoft-office-pa...) not mattering if they already have a similar service (OneDrive).

To me, these are signals of a good administration. This company is changing to keep growing, and I believe it is working. It's not the same Microsoft we knew a decade ago.

I find it interesting in how there is some dependence on the fingerprint secret being shared across the Telegram channel in order to verify identity.

What if a user sends the screenshots of the fingerprint over, say, a medium decided in the chat on the fly? Unless you can MITM every service they're using, you could just /tweet/ the fingerprints, for instance, and check on a different machine for a matching key. Or what if the screenshot is tampered with by hand, like, signing the center of the square with a finger drawn, transparent signature? How would an attacker replicate that?

Of course, the "supervillain" model still works and enough computation time and power might find it, but there are a multitude of ways to ensure that the secrets match on everyone's devices.

The problem with Threema and TextSecure is that it's hard to convince my friends to use them because

- Threema is not free and does not have desktop/web clients, and multi-device setup is not supported afaik- TextSecure is not really multi-platform

The only popular, multiplatform messengers at the moment are Whatsapp, FB Messenger, Viber/Line and Telegram. Whatsapp doesn't have a desktop client, Messenger requires a Facebook Login, Telegram and Whatsapp does not have voice chat and I hate Viber's design -> so I keep using Telegram for messaging and Skype for voice.

The network effects can be very nicely observed in messenger usages. In my home country almost everyone uses Viber, but in other countries I have worked (W-EU) almost everyone uses Whatsapp. In Germany people seem to know Telegram, in other places nobody heard about it.

Every one of these new chat systems have similar problems with key authentication. they fail in similar ways and try to solve the problem in similar and different ways. This articles contribution, while very valid with its "greater than though" tone, is gets on my nerves. I have no idea why it always seems to be a constant when people talk about Telegram without really investigating the dramatic headlines authors claim. Is it that we just hate anything engineered in Russia, China. Its boring already.

Huh! Just yesterday I was fed-up with Textsecure being so buggy and bad that I looked at the Telegram homepage and thought "nice" apart from not completely being free software (or is it?). It says "Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct." which made me believe that all messages are heavily encrypted.

Now this post says "By default, messages (...) are logged and stored on Telegram's servers". Damn.

I think there's more to it than referrer spam: unscrupulous SEO/SEM people artificially pumping up their performance to justify their rates.

A friend's analytics showed an amazing number of visits for a tiny site. While traffic was up, it did not lead to new clients. She fired the company she'd engaged for SEO/SEM because they kept raising their rates as traffic milestones were reached (hundreds of dollars a month).

Immediately after terminating that relationship, she noticed a 95% drop in traffic and panicked (see http://i.imgur.com/WwJ0vYo.png ). I was asked to fix it for her. One look in the referrers showed that this 95% all originated from China (ads.acesse.com) and was useless/fake (very few page views, very short durations). While we have no proof to support a lawsuit, the timing was too much of a coincidence to ignore.

I'm not sure what level of sophistication goes into GA's anomaly detection, but if those spammy domains show up, then I'm guessing it's not that difficult to cause much more damage using similar techniques.

It seems like they are targeting smaller sites desperate for traffic.They are trying to make the owners monitoring (Google) analytics look at their own site offering "SEO", "marketing", "social optimizations" and similar services that are probably as shady as their way of "contacting" the owners of low-traffic sites.

I have a site with less than 200 "visits" per month.20% of traffic apparently comes from the site semalt.semalt.com. 10% comes from this site: buttons-for-website.com.Another 6% is from this one: make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com

I've been noticing this for several years. A significant enough bulk of my logged traffic to my publishing label is this kind of spam that Ukraine shows up as my second largest source of traffic. My 9th most frequent referrer is, indeed, semalt.com, as mentioned in the article.

Generally, unless there's a major traffic spike from one source or another, I largely consider my traffic reports complete fiction because of this level of spam referrers.

For the server-side analytics, it's simple. Just use the GA Measurement Protocol, or a wrapper like staccato[1]. You can push the cid through ajax and javascript so you can even make proper reports, and just send everything from the JS to a dummy property.

I don't think the spammers are targeting Google Analytics specificaly as much as they are trying to get links for their domains on to the internet.

Lots of websites posts their visitor logs or stats on a special status-page (or at least used to do). If those links aren't rel=nofollow, then congratulations, your referer-spamming just gained yourself some SEO-bonus.

I'm not convinced that the glider represents the 'hacker community' as a whole - I know a good few folks (not only 'web developers') who have no idea about Game of Life. Damn, I know at least one good coder who never heard of IRC. So much for shared experience.

In all fairness I don't think a 'hacker community' as such exists any more - if there ever was one.

This, along with a life-long fascination with cellular automata, inspired me to get a tattoo of the glider sequence a few years ago. It is a tattoo that is occasionally difficult to explain to innocent bystanders but it constantly reminds me of what motivates and inspires me.

I was so impressed with the NYTimes article I saw posted this morning about a study done on strangers falling in love, that I took the questions from the original study and built an app / game. Should be a great tool for first dates or for fun with your lover. Enjoy!

Awesome to see this! After reading the article, I too thought about making an app for it, but kudos to you for beating me to the punch.

I might suggest making a native app though. Several developers made an absolute killing off their native versions of the NYT's 7 minute workout article (eventually pushing the NYT to release their own app).

I just realized that yesterday was the to-the-day 1 year anniversary of my girlfriend of 3 years dumping me in Palo Alto (via email) the day after she told me she could see us married and happy together (ouch!). Woke up, read HackerNews, and had this insatiable urge to blow off everything I had on my plate for PRMatch.com and code this sucker up. So grateful for all the praise / support / people using it and signing up for more free relationship tools.

Is the premise really that just the exercise alone produces the result? Wouldn't two people who were totally repulsed by each other's answers not fall in love? What about people who were just lukewarm towards each other's answers?

If that's the case, how does this idea allude to anything other than the concept that two people who generally get along with each other, and were already predisposed to liking each other in the first place, would develop feelings for each other after spending a few hours conversing and learning about each other?

The graphic is amazing, definitely one of the better implementations which help put the scale in to perspective.

Couple of details which I think help put this route in to perspective for the non-climbers:

1. Caldwell, one of the best climbers in the world, has been working on trying to climb this since 2007--the combination of longevity and perseverance is hard to match.

2. The easiest pitch (out of 30 total for the route, a pitch being a rope length usually between 100 and 200 feet) is 5.11 which is pretty hard but the real kicker is that there are 5 pitches 5.14 and of those 2 are 5.14d which is was the upper limit of difficulty until the last decade. Most 5.14 routes are short single pitch routes which take pros sometimes weeks or months of practice to climb. Not every pro can climb every 5.14 since they require a high degree of specialization dependent. There are 10s of 5.12 and 5.13 pitches thrown which makes the whole project together the hardest complete free route in history.

I'm kind of amazed to see this much press (multiple NYT stories, new channel coverage) on a big wall climb (or any climb not involving someone dying) and can't really remember something equivalent.

I recommend everyone visit Yosemite once. The scale is mind-bending. The falls appear in slow motion because the water is traveling such a great distance. Enormous, ancient trees appear as peach fuzz atop the walls.

I can't think of another place where you can walk right up to something so massive rising out of the earth.

I climbed a much more modest, easy peak there 15 years ago, and saw the headlamps across the valley of climbers on el cap. Its an awe-inspiring scene in the literal sense.

If you go, take the time to hike away from the crowds. It's a zoo of cars but quiet and breathtakingly beautiful if you explore.

Very cool. I was lucky enough to see them on the wall a week ago, and the scale and difficulty of it completely blows my mind. This visualization does a better job reproducing the in-person awe than any others I've seen.

I would welcome some additional thickness in my iphone for a better battery life. The end goal should not be a paperthin phone; it should be a phone that has a long charge time and fits reasonably into your pocket / hand. Phones are pretty important to people and it's silly something so important is so needy of recharging.

It's not technology so much that is the problem, it is design principles and priorities.

If phone manufacturers weren't in a constant race to cut the last .1 oz off of their phones while still being barely-sufficient to get through a day, this wouldn't even be an issue. I'd be happy to double my phone's weight for 3 days of life.

The company that wins the jackpot on this isn't going to be the one with the most advanced batteries. It's going to be the company that figures out how to cut platform bloat down to a reasonable size, reducing energy consumption by an order of magnitude.

They're also going to have to figure out ways to keep third-party apps from undoing their hard work.

True. I'm one of those people who religiously plug my phone every night, yet, I often ran out of power when I really needed it (eg: browsing / tethering on a long train trip).

I recently got a One plus one, and I really couldn't tell you all the good geeky spec, I actually don't care about all it's little flaws, but I loves the amazing battery life. I will not buy another phone with lesser battery life. There is no other geeky spec that can trump that.

What percentage of people don't/can't charge their phone every night? And of those who don't/can't, what percentage of them aren't satisfied with the myriad external battery cases and on-the-go-chargers available for smart phones. I challenge the assumption that the majority of people are asking for better batteries. I think it's like people asking Ford for a faster horse.

This is one of the main reasons I still don't have a smartphone. Battery life on an old Nokia is well in excess of 5 days, it works whenever I need it when on the road even when there are no wall sockets for miles around.

* no video acceleration, no graphics acceleration, and no fading/smooth window transitions, 10hz refresh rate is more than enough to read text

I wonder which of those things save the most battery, but I guess all of this would easily double battery life. Also I guess that device would cost much less and be very attractive for students, and be enough to just code if you'd have an online compiler. If you want calls, just buy a candybar phone, like the the latest nokia 100 or 200 series.

I'd buy it even if it cost $300. I wonder how expensive e-ink screen are, but I would not be surprised it's mostly a patent issue.

If Apple announced the next iPhone and it had a battery that lasted twice as long as the current one I think a lot of people would be happy. I've noticed I get about 1.5 days now with my iPhone 6 and not having to worry if I forget to charge it at night is great. If it could get me to the end of the next day it would be perfect. It seems that every year phone manufacturers make battery improvements but these are offset by the new sensors and screens. If they skipped everything except battery for one generation, doubled it, and then went back to features would they be able to continue adding features at the previous rate while maintaining the new battery life?

It's really interesting how much improved batteries could improve all sorts of tech. Phones and wearables are pretty much the least interesting of them, too.

Imagine for a moment that batteries are 1000x better than now. A ton of problems are magically solved. Renewable energy is suddenly trivial. Run the world on solar and wind, done! Electric cars are now the only reasonable kind. Trucks and trains too. Even airplanes. Many satellites could be replaced with long-duration drones. Those that remain can be built lighter and cheaper. Supersonic airliners might even come back, since fuel costs would drop through the floor.

Oh, and your smartphone could run for three years on a charge. Woohoo.

Compare with something like fusion power, which only solves a tiny fraction of the above. Without storage, fusion isn't that interesting. With good storage, it's not necessary!

Because cars are not expected, under normal circumstances, to experience abnormal amounts of current on any given circuit. Unlike a house, where you can easily plug in something into the outlet that can overwhelm the circuit, in a car each circuit is designed specifically for a given maximum load.

When you blow a circuit in a house, you have most likely massed up and plugged too many things into one outlet, or your device is drawing too much power. You learn from your mistake, unplug the device, and reset the circuit. If a car blows a circuit, then there is something seriously wrong with some component of the car or the wiring. You don't want the user to be able to reset the circuit, you want someone who knows what they are doing to figure our what went wrong.

I fix all of my own cars, and never once have I ever had a blow fuse "just because." There always was an underlining cause which needed to be addressed. Except once, when a 10A fuse was used in a circuit that required a 25A fuse, on a window motor.

So, basically, in a well functioning and well designed car a fuse will not fail just because. So why bother replacing a part that costs less then a cent with a part that costs several dollars. I hate this attitude, just because something CAN be complex, does NOT mean it has to be complex.

Take car modules for instance. It used to be that back in the day (the 90s) your headlights were operated by a mechanical relay. This relay was expected to fail at some point (though they very rarely actually did fail) and as a result this relay was installed in an easily accessible place. If it did fail, it would cost $10-15 to replace it plus 5 minutes of labor.

New cars nowadays have solid state switching modules to operate headlights, and everything else in your car. These components are not expected to fail, even though they often do. Don't believe me, talk to any mechanic. However, because they are not expected to fail, they are often installed deep inside the car. So, now, if your headlight module fails, it costs $400 in parts, and several hours of labor to fix the same problem. Progress?

Stop making things needlessly complicated. Blade fuses are a fine solution to a problem.

"So theres a few things at play here. For context, I run the Product Security team at Tesla and Im safety-trained on the HV systems - Im also working hands-on with a small drive inverter on a hobby project right now.

First and foremost, our large drive unit pulls about 1000A at full load, and switching that with silicon is tough. We use a bank of custom IGBTs on each of the high/low sides of each of the 3 rotor phases in order to handle the power, and thats with active fluid cooling. You can switch that much current with silicon but it aint cheap, and youll need either active cooling or a bunch of thermal mass if you want the thing to switch more than once. http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/attachment.php... is a decent pic, the object on the left is a single-phase switch, you can see 6x transistors laying flat at the front for one side of the phase (the other bank is behind).

Secondly, Model S is an AC induction motor so the current through the winding ramps up more-or-less linearly over time until the phase switches off (or changes direction). Youre at high power but youre not switching the load at zero-crossing as you would in a resonant load such as a Tesla coil, instead you have to switch at an increasing current depending on how much power you want to the wheels. You now dont just have to switch a lot of power, you have to switch it FAST so that the resistive losses in the FETs dont blow out the power channel due to ohmic losses. Your switch is now not just big and bulky, its complicated (since you need an additional HV supply) and pretty sensitive to things like stray capacitances. On the previous pic the big black brick on top of the PCB is the capacitor that dumps into the IGBT gates to make them switch fast enough.

Finally, I believe theres a regulatory issue. I think Im right in saying that automotive standards around the world require that all electrical systems are fused, and considering that theres multiple separate power rails its not inconceivable that an event could take place that leaves the HV drive rail powered on but kills the 12V accessory rail that powers a lot of the CAN systems. You could end up disabling your active fuse while the HV system is still energized, and considering the amperage our lithium packs can deliver (P85D draws up to 1.5kA) thats not going to end well.

Woz: I would LOVE to put you under a Tesla NDA and then give you a _real_ tour of the vehicle - ping me at kpaget@teslamotors.com if youre interested. Im curious, do you still have one of my RFID cloners on your shelf somewhere?"

Well, amateur experimental aircraft have something like this available: http://verticalpower.com/ - but there's a lot of negative reactions to this kind of technology, because it introduces new failure modes where none previously existed before.

But I think something that people forget is that generally, fuses are there to protect wiring and fixtures (switches, connectors, etc) from fire. Preventing the device on the circuit that you, the user, cares about from completely melting down is just a nice bonus.

That's why building wiring codes generally spec fuses to cope with the capacity handled by wiring and switches, rather than the loads attached to it.

EDIT: In any case you NEVER want the car to silently and automatically try to "re-set" a tripped breaker, surely. You want this kind of fault to present itself noisily and obviously; it's a precursor to a potentially dangerous condition.

Any automatic re-set will have to factor in some cool-down time for the wiring in between attempts... what is the temperature of an overheating pair of conductors in the wiring loom when the breaker tripped? What rate of heat dissipation is there allowing them to cool down again? A wire which has experienced overheating will have a different (higher) resistance after the short-circuit event. Even if the wire isn't permenantly damaged, the temporary increase in temperature will still guarantee a momentarily higher resistance. Will the wire still have low enough resistance to trip the breaker again when the short is applied again?

The fuse is also protecting the wire. So in a car you have a big fuse (fusible link) protecting the big wire to the fuse box. Then you have a bunch of little fuses protecting the wire on each branch circuit. All these fuses are intended to last for the life of the vehicle. The only time they would blow would be on the type of fault that would require further troubleshooting. It is unlikely that you could produce an electronic current limiter that would be cheaper and more reliable than a single use fuse.

My father the mechanic used to like to tell me about an exception to the rule as an object lesson about the trade off between risk and reliability. Back in the days of breaker ignitions the ignition circuit was almost never fused. A blown fuse in the ignition circuit could strand people out in the middle of nowhere. The extra risk was acceptable to eliminate the situation where the fuse blew when the ignition might of been able to continue to work in some sort of degraded mode. It was OK that that degraded mode might involve smoke and flame.

This is a perfect example of the KISS principle. Since I would never presume to call Woz stupid, let's call it the KISW (Keep It Simple Woz) principle in this case.

Woz is proposing that Tesla take well proven, very reliable, simple, inexpensive fuses that are very rarely even seen by customers and replace them with complex integrated circuits and software that will need a lot of testing, almost certainly be more expensive, and almost certainly be less reliable. For what? Very little benefit for a very small subset of customers.

KISW! Sometimes a small length of wire in a plastic holder is the best answer to a problem.

Can't say I've ever seen a fuse in a car blow that didn't come from a short that had to be fixed anyway. Having a circuit breaker or software solution some end user would just flip again would damage the system even more and risk fires. Maybe Woz is smart about computers, but doesn't know anything about cars?

Even before seeing it was Woz that posted - the answer in my head was "because they work". And he made no compelling argument to have something else.

I don't believe in smartness for smartness' sake. For a fuse to fail you need 1) wrong fuse 2) physical damage to the fuse (not sure if there is a case in which this would cause it to not break the circuit), different set of laws of physics.

I've replaced most of the easily blown fuses in my car (accessories, etc.) with PTCs. Now I joke that turning the car off and then on again fixes the problem. However, I wouldn't do that with a vital system (starter motor, etc.) because a blown fuse generally informs you of a deeper problem, rather than being the problem itself.

To me the interesting part of this was how social media is sometimes absolutely amazing. Woz idly poses a question about the fuses in his car and has an engineer from the manufacturer write a detailed response in short order. That is incredible.

Having fuses as a last-ditch safety measure can be a really good idea, as often the alternative to a fuse blowing is a fire. That said, they should probably be using self-resetting circuit breakers rated to trip before the fuses blow. It's possible they do and his car has a legitimate short.

In a way what he is proposing is already used for some systems of a car, although far from everything and mostly for lower currents. Some ecus are capable of delivering enough power from their own I/O pins to drive other components, if any of these outputs are shorted the ecu can detect this, power off the output and enter appropriate failure mode(diagnostics code + disable other functions). When the short is gone it will automatically activate again if considered safe.

So theres a few things at play here. For context, I run the Product Security team at Tesla and Im safety-trained on the HV systems - Im also working hands-on with a small drive inverter on a hobby project right now.

First and foremost, our large drive unit pulls about 1000A at full load, and switching that with silicon is tough. We use a bank of custom IGBTs on each of the high/low sides of each of the 3 rotor phases in order to handle the power, and thats with active fluid cooling. You can switch that much current with silicon but it aint cheap, and youll need either active cooling or a bunch of thermal mass if you want the thing to switch more than once. http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/attachment.php... is a decent pic, the object on the left is a single-phase switch, you can see 6x transistors laying flat at the front for one side of the phase (the other bank is behind).

Secondly, Model S is an AC induction motor so the current through the winding ramps up more-or-less linearly over time until the phase switches off (or changes direction). Youre at high power but youre not switching the load at zero-crossing as you would in a resonant load such as a Tesla coil, instead you have to switch at an increasing current depending on how much power you want to the wheels. You now dont just have to switch a lot of power, you have to switch it FAST so that the resistive losses in the FETs dont blow out the power channel due to ohmic losses. Your switch is now not just big and bulky, its complicated (since you need an additional HV supply) and pretty sensitive to things like stray capacitances. On the previous pic the big black brick on top of the PCB is the capacitor that dumps into the IGBT gates to make them switch fast enough.

Finally, I believe theres a regulatory issue. I think Im right in saying that automotive standards around the world require that all electrical systems are fused, and considering that theres multiple separate power rails its not inconceivable that an event could take place that leaves the HV drive rail powered on but kills the 12V accessory rail that powers a lot of the CAN systems. You could end up disabling your active fuse while the HV system is still energized, and considering the amperage our lithium packs can deliver (P85D draws up to 1.5kA) thats not going to end well.

Woz: I would LOVE to put you under a Tesla NDA and then give you a _real_ tour of the vehicle - ping me at kpaget@teslamotors.com if youre interested. Im curious, do you still have one of my RFID cloners on your shelf somewhere? [2]

Decided to start over in the bay area last year with my wife. Our housing criteria was: central to everything (I have locations of interest all over the bay), Within walking distance of my job (Downtown Palo Alto), 1 bedroom, low rent (under $2k/mo), 100Mb+ internet, and the ability to move in right away. Everyone told me that was impossible.

EPA however met all that criteria perfectly. Landed on a Friday, picked out an apartment over the weekend, and had the keys on Monday. Unlike many areas in the bay, demand is fairly low in EPA and there are available apartments everywhere.

Despite being a perfect fit for my needs, never did I realize what kind of judgement I would get from so many people for living here. I get a shocked expression almost every time I mention I live in EPA. Some people even get angry. "Why would you drag your wife to place like that?!?!". Many people I know when shopping for apartments themselves openly say there is no way they could ever live somewhere so "unsafe" and just consider my wife and I to be "lucky" or "living dangerously". The very idea that a white couple with a tech job income would -choose- to live in EPA blows peoples minds. I used to just tell people I live in Palo Alto to avoid the judgement, but now I happily claim it and discuss the misconceptions. My wife and I are pretty happy with all our ideals met. We won at housing by ignoring meaningless stigma and will be squatting here for a while. Might even buy a house while the market is still 1/4. Property value here is sure to soar once people realize the "murder capitol" age is distant history.

The stigma from past history is incredibly present, but the _reality_ is this is one of the safest feeling places I have ever lived. (And I have lived a lot of places)

While the article is an interesting read overall (didn't know about the connection to "Dangerous Minds"), it perpetuates the myth that Palo Alto Airport was imposed on an existing poor/ethnic community.

This is not true, the airport preceded other development, having been opened prior to World War 2.[1] There were similar voices after the twin-engine Cessna crash as to the outrage of building an airport next to (inexpensive) housing[2]. The causality is reversed from the truth: the housing was/is cheap because there was a pre-existing airport. (And routes do not go over East Palo Alto's residential areas).

(Oh, and the starting photo brings back memories of entering the pattern to land)

When we first moved down to the bay area for YC, we moved into a new development house in EPA right next to Ikea. I frequently joke that EPA is not the same as Palo Alto, and while the rest of our batchmates had apartments in dowtown Mountain View or houses in the Los Altos hills, I really enjoyed living in EPA.

It was grimy, I'd frequently hear cop car sirens at 4 in the morning. And, there wasn't much to do in the immediate area unless you wanted to cross the freeway into Palo Alto. Being there was always a stark reminder of how little that community had, and also how little we had compared to all of the riches around us. Being there felt appropriate for us.

I appreciate my time in EPA, because it was a little microcosm that trapped some of the larger, harder problems of the real-world, hidden inside the bubble that is silicon valley.

I grew up in Redwood City and maintain very close friendships with high school teammates from EPA. This article caused me to make an account on hacker news so I could share a not so unique, but perhaps unheard, perspective on what it means to have a community like East Palo Alto (a.k.a. 'EPA') in the middle of silicon valley.

EDIT: this post quickly digressed into a four page behemoth that was too long to post in a single comment. It's long and I fear the formatting would have been awful. I will put up a WP site sometime tomorrow so that I may edit it and format it nicely. Below is a brief excerpt from the end. I'll make an edit to this post as soon as the WP site is up.

----------------------

If anything is to be taken away from my experience and these stories is that the men and women who are forced to grow up in this environment live in cyclical state of despair. A vacuum that requires quite nearly a winning lottery ticket to escape.

For it to be located so close to the affluent areas of silicon valley is practically criminal. It is eerily close to being the pit in which Bane grew up in during the Batman movies, the one where he lived in a prison that could see freedom and happiness just a couple hundred feet away.

If I make any sort of dime in Silicon Valley I fully intend to research and hopefully participate in philanthropy that will contribute to problems such as these.

I believe it becomes our responsibility when it is in our own back yard.

The redlining maps of San Francisco and Oakland are interesting, but their resolution is artificially limited. You can see the full resolution maps by removing the height and width parameters from the URLs:

While the article is well worth reading, I was bothered by the article implicitly defining Asians as not counting towards a diverse workforce. I admit my point is unrelated to the bigger points of the article.

There's a huge demand for housing of any kind in the Bay Area, so it doesn't surprise me that areas like East Palo Alto and the Bayview are going to face a lot of demographic upheaval, unless new housing units are brought online in other areas.

There doesn't seem to be any appetite whatsoever for filling in more of the San Francisco Bay to create land, and there are restrictions and conservation easements on most of the land stretching from 280 to the Coastside.

One possible area to expand into would be Coyote Valley, south of San Jose, which was a growth target during the first dot.com bubble in 1999, around a Cisco campus. If Caltrain could put in a station there, along with express lines, that may open up a middle-class area to new housing opportunities.

It's more complicated than that. It's a soft racism -- many are fine with wealthy or well-to-do black neighbors, but do not want poor neighbors.

They also don't want to do what is really required to make sure the next generation of black citizens is truly on equal footing, including actual poverty remediation. That means taxes and wealth redistribution.

"We dont even want people like you in our subdivisions".It happens even now. I see in our Boston suburb, whites usually abandon apartment communities that increasingly host foreign workers. And that's not because of violence. I really don't find it bizarre and it's perfectly natural. We find ourselves more comfortable among people of our own kind. If that's not acceptable then nationalism too shouldn't be because that's another kind of discrimination and at a different level.

For me the interesting part was the tablet he brought back from DPRK. It contained 70+ books with their leader' speeches, but they somehow customized the Android so it is not possible to extract them :D

Fun trick: Pause the simulation with the space bar. Then, take your mouse and drag it on the surface of the water, you will notice it creates ripples but in the paused state.

Drag the mouse rapidly back and forth in a very tiny area so that it creates a layered 'ripple' that grows and grows. If you spend about 2 minutes doing this you can make the ripple go like 10 feet high completely off the screen.

The only minor nit I can come up with is the lack of surface tension. When you pull the ball up through the surface of the water, some of the water should stick to the ball. Maybe the ball is made out of lotus leaves, though.

I'd also expect some more bubbles when violently stirring the pool with the ball.

I remember trying to run this on my phone previously and it not working. I also remember it causing my cup fan to fire up when I played with it on my laptop. The fact that the iPhone 6 runs this so well is pretty dang cool.

Does anyone happen to know what the effect is called that the sky is reflected stronger at shallow angles and whether that is the same effect which makes rough surfaces reflective at very shallow angles?

A big problem I experience is the lack of web-safe keyboard shortcuts for complex web-apps. If looking for a safe key-combination, you have to consider the superset of OS and Browser combinations and that leaves almost nothing.

The gmail approach is for unmodified keys but that only works if you don't have focus in an editable field. The gdocs approach is for menu chords but that sucks for frequent actions and still generates weird dual handling of events by the browser.

I'd love a web/browser standards committee to preserve the universal utility of the keyboard. It could ring-fence some application specific shortcuts, give a semantic abstraction of some actions e.g. undo, and standardise mechanisms for os specific remappings.

As it is, as more tech comes along, the less usable keyboards become. I am still dumbfounded that the iPad lacks a tab button or any chord for one despite claiming to be usable for word-processing. This basically means no web-app can ever assume a keyboard has a tab key. Gah.

The author bemoans overly complex modern web standards, but surely this is an inevitable result of the web's transition from "an easy way to view documents" to "a safe mechanism for remote code execution". I mean sure, in the old days anyone could learn the important HTML tags in a weekend, but they couldn't use those tags to emulate an MS-DOS game. The only way to enable that was to gradually evolve web APIs that safely exposed all the low-level functionality.

Or, the only way apart from plugins, anyway. In comments the author writes:

> In the future, I suspect some group will do it right and create a wonderful plugin or default wrap-in for all browsers that will simply function as the native environment all this material needs. At that point, MESS and DOSBOX will be ported to this...

..which is essentially Flash (which has had solid dynamic audio for years, and console emulators built on it with good audio support (see:nesbox)). In a parallel universe where Flash was an open standard, it'd be exactly what the author is asking for. Except in that universe, Flash would presumably share whatever problems the author finds with web standards.

Unless we want to choose One Browser or One Plugin, I'd say we're better off with complicated, slow-moving standards (like Web Audio), even if they are developed and implemented by adversarial companies.

I think the main problem with WebAudio is that it was originally designed under the assumption that Javascript would be too slow to fill audio buffers fast enough for low latency buffer queueing, and thus this complex audio-node system was conceived where audio data would flow through black-box processing nodes written in C/C++.

In a perfect world, a low-level web audio API would focus on providing an as direct-as-possible way to stream raw audio data (buffer queueing like in OpenAL, or a wrap-around buffer like in DirectSound), make sure that this works well with WebWorkers (i.e., worker thread should be able to queue new data when required, not when the main loop gets around to it), and move all the complicated high-level audio-graph stuff into optional Javascript libs.

I put together a mobile-friendly version of a Javascript NES emulator for a hackathon [1], and I converted it to use the Web Audio API[2]. It works, but sounds very janky. I had to divide all of the integer audio samples into floating point values just so that they could be converted to integer values at some point later on. I also wanted to be able to use a gamepad for the emulator, but the last revision to the Gamepad API was a year ago[3], and browser support is pretty lacking[4]. I really like the idea of browser emulation because native emulators are banned from the App Store, but the web APIs are just not there yet.

Side note: If anyone wants to take over webNES and make it awesome, free free to message me

I know several people who have been going over the audio issues in browsers. I remember how painful flash's audio was to deal with, and the browser vendors have managed to make something worse... I do hope that web audio gets better (good for that matter).

To really get where people want to go in terms of browser based gaming (even if the idea disgusts you) is going to hinge on 3D video, great audio composition and good controller capabilities.

Here's hoping that Spartan not only is on rapid release cycle but it's fork of Trident and Chakra are developed in an open source project (e.g. Gecko, WebKit, Blink) so developers can submit fixes and features and not have to wait a year for them to be available.

There is a temporary work-around, I would think. Presumably the data that games expect to be driving sound comes out in a byte stream, like anything else, expecting to be passed to a side-effect producing function provided by the environment. You wouldn't need to even write the code that processes that data into sound, you could just sample (perhaps on original equipment) and provide sound resource files, and then make sure to play the right sample for any particular set of bytes passed to your implementation. (Even if Web Audio standardizes, it's not clear to me how you would handle essentially arbitrary output-to-be-interpreted-as-sound from an arbitrary process!)

They have a very interesting way of reporting radiation exposure (ditto with airport scanners). Instead of reporting the total body accumulated dose, they report the dose a single scanning beam sweep induces over a small area.

These machines use a tight beam (or several) which sweep. Each individual beam when measured in isolation likely deliver 0.1 microSievert of radiation. However the total body dose (accumulated dose) is significantly higher than that (because you'd measure the total dose delivered, rather than the total dose delivered to a small 1x1 square cross-section).

This is interesting because while the body can and does (continuously) repair DNA damage, it has diminishing returns. So 0.1 microSieverts to the entire body is totally inconsequential, however 0.1 * 100 or more? Particularly to people who are frequently scanned (or those with weakened bodies due to illness or age).

Plus these X-Ray means can and do bounce. So imagine three 1x1 cross sections, you scan the left and right, but the middle will have a measurable radiation exposure even if not directly exposed to the X-Ray beam (partly because the beams are imprecise but partly because of reflected X-Rays).

Honestly 0.1 Sv is the headline figure. What is the full body accumulated figure? I'm going to guess as much as .30 Sv per scan.

>> "The X-ray vanswhich reportedly cost between $729,000 and $825,000 eachare designed to find organic materials such as drugs and explosives."

As much as I don't like this at least explosives are a good reasoning for using them. Drugs? Come on! Exposing citizens to radiation, no matter how little, so you can find people in possession of drugs is ludicrous. Every time you think the war on drugs has reached the height of stupidity they raise the bar even further.

'"While this court is cognizant and sensitive to concerns about terrorism, being located less than a mile from the 9/11 site, and having seen firsthand the effects of terrorist destruction, nonetheless, the hallmark of our great nation is that it is a democracy, with a transparent government," she [Supreme Court Judge Doris Ling-Cohan] wrote in her decision last month.'

What implications does this program have for the 4th amendment right to not have a search conducted without a warrant? If they're used on the public at large, generating mass probable cause or a blanket expectation that anyone could be a dangerous terrorist as justification is a scary precedent.

It's reminiscent of the FLIR vans used to catch marijuana growers that the Supreme Court determined to be mobile Constitution violators. They are still being used to bust people who like to grow Christmas trees or tomatoes indoors.

I feel bad for the minority that are terrorized by authorities suspecting them of engaging in criminal activities based on their nationality or skin color and fuzzy scans of their businesses, homes and vehicles.

Fourth Amendment issues aside, as a non-American this strikes me as an obvious violation of Human Rights (especially the right to bodily integrity in particular).

I'm not sure what the situation is like in the US, but I'm fairly certain that in my country you couldn't be subjected to an x-ray scan without consent, unless there is sufficiently strong suspicion and an x-ray scan would be the least invasive option (e.g. this is why you can be forced to give a blood sample if you refuse to take a breathalyser test when assumed to DUI).

I have no idea how random drive-by x-rays on the street could be considered reasonable and not in violation of Human Rights unless you're in a freakin warzone.

>>But most Federal Drug Administration regulations for medical X-rays do not apply to security equipment, leaving the decision of when and how to use the scanners up to law enforcement agencies such as the NYPD.

The use of these vans seems like an opportunity for some investigative journalism.

Setup dosimeters to detect the x-rays as the vans pass by, record a video of it happening, then tell the pedestrians nearby that their government just irradiated them without their knowledge or consent and see what they say in response.

Or setup stands that detect the x-rays and automatically announce over a loudspeaker that people standing nearby are being irradiated an observe the reaction.

If the police are not confident that the responses will be welcoming, they should not be doing this.

It seems the NYPDs argument is that releasing information on the vans will allow people to predict where they are (or more likely be told ala speed cameras) and so avoid them (civilians as well as criminals).

That's kind of the point of a deterrent.

You cannot scan every car on every journey, at least not without a massive spike in cancers, so this is a deterrent.

And it's a secret deterrant....

So it won't catch anyone because you can't scan everyone, and it won't deter anyone because no one knows it's there

I think measuring "human-usable information" is a slippery slope. You'll start with just believing that only human-language text qualifies, but the definition can be pushed.

For example, "human-usable information" could be added by changing the color of certain words. If our site is meant to teach English, changing all nouns to the color green is useful and definitely "human-usable information," right? But how do you measure the amount of information it conveys?

It's ultimately very philosophically hard. This matters because a webapp's assets (images, styling, scripts) are as much a part of its content as the actual text on a page. If you confine your definition to encompass only human-readable, I don't think it's useful.

Combine with another compromised password, and we're coming dangerously close to being able to generate a password for any arbitrary website.

Edit: I agree with the replies that this is an unlikely attack considering how passwords are typically compromised. And it's probably better than how most people choose passwords. But the website claims that this generates "very strong passwords," which is nonsense.

I think I'd like PasswordCard because it's pretty freeform - just pick a starting point and a visual direction/pattern and copy letters from the card. But honestly I don't much like the idea of relying on a physical token if I don't need to. Almost losing my 2FA last year was a bit scary.

Except it's not going to work, because of the bank who doesn't allow '(' as a special character, or the ticket website that requires at least 3 digits, or the financial firm who only allows 8 character passwords. As soon as you have a few sites with 'rogue' password policies, the system breaks down.

Besides other problems (like not working with certain password requirements), this particularly doesn't work when a site forces you to reset your password because of a breach or time limit or who knows what. (Yahoo just forced a mandatory password reset on me today, without even giving a reason except to "protect my account".)

Then you've got to remember -- are you now on amazon3 or amazon4 or gmail4 or gmail5? And then it defeats the whole purpose of the card.

What prevents me from using this type of strategy is the inconsistent adoption of password requirements.

For example, some of the websites I use require passwords to contain at least one capital letter, or a digit, or a punctuation mark (e.g. ! ? #, etc.). But other Website do not allow punctuation marks or digits.

Some require a password of a minimum length, but a dwindling few can only accept fairly short maximum length password.

If the end goal is to turn a long, comprehensible password like "correcthorsebatterystaple" into something not remotely subject to a dictionary attack, then merely shifting your fingers over on the keyboard by one key is much more convenient: "vpttrvyjptdrnsyyrtudys[;r". Sure, it suffers from the same short-comings as mentioned above (it's still a substitution cipher), but it's much more convenient than going to the card for each individual letter. "vottrvyjptdrnsyyrtudys[;r" is as quick to type as correcthorsebatterystaple but much more secure.

That's all well and good until you lose it or run it through the washing machine. Then your entire password system is gone. Any backup would need to be stored in a place that might as well be your 1Password/LastPass database.

I actually really like this idea. I guess if your attacker did get your password in the clear (bad encryption or whatever) then they'd basically have access everything right? I mean, the number of letters at the start is presumably fairly constant, they'd know the site it was for so they could then work out the "unique secret" in the middle right?

That said, there's a certain amount of security through obscurity I guess.

Still, for any of the sites I really care about I use two factor authentication. I'd take a mediocre password and 2FA over a strong password (But happy to be proved wrong ;)

This is a poorly thought out (qwerty only ?) and weak security attempt to make money ripping off the concept from the much better and secure password card at https://www.passwordcard.org/ that anyone can print themselves.

How about doing Vigenere in your head? This is what I do: I actually write my passwords down in my little black book, which I carry in my pocket. I use a simple Vigenere cypher in case I lose the book. Each password is encrypted with the same master key, which I memorize.

For example, if my master key was 1234, and my password was 'baNana3', it would write down 'ayKwmy0'. When I look up the password, I shift the letters forward as I type them:

a + 1 = b

y + 2 = a (wrap around the end of the alphabet)

K + 3 = N

w + 4 = a

m + 1 = n

y + 2 = a

0 + 3 = 3

It's not too hard to advance 9 or fewer letters in the alphabet as you type.

I don't believe in these sorts of database-free password management systems. These require users to remember too much stuff and are not flexible to be used universally. And using these gets only more painful over time as exceptions etc accumulate. These issues have been discussed fairly comprehensively in the various HN threads on hash-based password managers, which share most if not all the downsides with this particular project.

This would actually be very useful for my Google and LastPass password. I have everything else in my LastPass manager, but it is always trying to get into my google account from different places is difficult, so I have a rememberable password for both.

Cool solution for folks like us. Best way to diminish password as an attack vector and secure services for the thronged masses is to reduce the number of passwords required to use the Internet. And couple a master (eg My google account) account with a second, biometric factor.

Heh, I loved the term "truckers in space", which pretty accurately described some of the characters in Alien - Brett, Parker, Dallas.

Speaking of Ridley Scott, my favorite movie of all time is Blade Runner. I was watching it the other day, and noticed that the incept dates of some of replicants were 2016. Oh boy, Ridley got that one wrong. But they still used payphones too, like in Alien. Remember Deckard calling Rachel from the video pay phone at the bar?

So it seems like filmmakers predictions either grossly mispredict the amount of technological progress at the big scale. Everybody thought there would be moon colonies by now, or advanced cyborgs. Or they don't see the technological innovation at the small scale. They can't see things like cell phones, the internet, etc..

I have seen several movies with the 70s or so, with flat screens hanging on the wall. So I guess they ocassionally get things right

"The U.S. is not waging the Cold War in outer space. We have no moon colonies, and our supercomputers are not nearly as super as the murderous HAL. "

2001 was a prescient film, but the details have turned out somewhat differently than Kubrick and Clarke imagined. HAL was portrayed as truly sentient. The same cannot be said of any AI existing today. However, HAL was also immensely limited. He was like a servant or child in his abilities. He was not the the oracle and gateway to the sum of all human knowledge, as the computers of today have become. If you asked HAL how to build a boat or how to score a date with a beautiful woman, he'd have been baffled. Google, on the other hand... HAL also had a large central core that could be attacked. If we built a true AI today, it's possible that the brains of such a beast could be the size of a pocket watch and the software copied and transferred freely. If such a viral consciousness had infested the Discovery, Dave would truly have had nothing to strike back against. HAL would not have been a single consciousness, but a legion!

Meanwhile, the U.S. is very much still engaged in a struggle for control of space. Other challengers have appeared, but Russia hasn't gone anywhere, and that particular war seems to be getting colder by the minute. However, the commercialization of space has been late in coming. Pan Am's collapse must have delayed things somewhat. However, it's finally starting to happen.

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"Mother, on the other hand, spends the whole movie like a fated southern belle hooked on laudanum, locked in her room. She cant even advise on how to defeat the monster. The computer cannot help. No costly investment in heavy capital will keep nature at bay. "

Alien does indeed present a very different view of technology. Where, in 2001, technology was the tool of humanity, uplifting it to greater and greater heights, in Alien technology cannot overcome the base nature of humans. The people in space aren't heroes or explorers, but working-class stiffs trying to make a living. Technology serves its owners first and foremost. The corporation's interests reign supreme, even over the space workers very lives. This vision too is both wrong yet prescient. The computers of today are of tremendous help, but are also tools of control. You can ask google how to do practically anything, but you have to accept the fact that your request will be logged by the NSA (and probably other organizations) for future reference should you ever be naughty. Computers do not directly control us, but other humans use computers to tell us how to do things. For example, look up why UPS drivers are trained to avoid turning left. Computers and automation have eliminated many jobs, but always seem to create even more in the process.

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The last few years have greatly increased my optimism for the future. It seems that we're finally pulling out of the cyberpunk dystopian funk of the last decade or so and trying to do "big" things once again. Electric cars are finally a practical reality. Self driving cars are close at hand. Private space flight is taking off. People are talking about capturing and bringing asteroids down to Earth for their resources. Space elevators that will make getting bulk quantities of material off of Earth seem almost possible. Quantum cryptology is currently in limited use and expanding, and may one day offer us all security from the NSA's of the world, even should they gain the tremendous power of quantum computers, which themselves will offer humanity fantastic new abilities. 3D printing is rapidly improving and making new things possible, and our advances in nanotechnology will only amplify and ramify their capabilities. It's an exciting time to be alive, even in spite of all the nicks and cuts we receive from the other side of every new sword we invent. Humanity needs to keep its ideals and be on guard against the darker half of it's nature, but there are many great reasons to think we might just surprise ourselves and turn out okay after all.

Hacking for the latest and greatest Xeon CPUs feels a lot like Forth on small machines to me. Each core has only 256KB of fast private memory (L2 cache). Squeezing the working set into that memory means fast execution that is independent of the other cores. That is really worth spending some brain cycles on when optimizing for 36+ core servers.

This is a very popular repostas it should be, because it's a very good and well-thought-out article, and a surprisingly well-reasoned and well-written example of the "meditation on a programming language" genre of blog postand each of the past comment threads is also worth consulting.

I'm among those who have enjoyed the satisfaction of making my own Forth-like, and I've even used it only to find the same kinds of difficulties as author. Aiming for less is always a valid approach, but it's hard to reconcile with this era of software and the benefits of sheer magnitude. It might have been less true in the early 70's when software was less of an "ecosystem."

But on re-reading this for the n'th time I think the lede of this one is in the comments. Like any guru who is selling a "right way of doing," Chuck Moore has always had a business interest in selling snowflake Forth services of some kind. He, and other Forth followers, may well believe the pitch fervently. It is, at least, a relatively self-consistent ideology, and it discards the messy aspect of building any kind of institutional presence. But it also has a kind of dogmatic quality.

Dexter was a little too early. The United States, although it had dumped the nobility concept, still had the English feudal concept that big landowners ruled, almost by right. Manufacturing hadn't yet displaced landowning as the way to make money.

As for the follies of the rich, we still have that. Larry Ellison has a huge, silly house in Woodside, where, through much cutting of rock, a sort of pseudo rural Japanese landscape was created, complete with fog machine. In China, where being rich is a new thing, people are still trying to figure out status symbols. The results are amusing. (http://www.gq.com/news-politics/201501/chinas-richest). There are outfits selling titles of nobility on line. (http://nobility.co.uk/).

The common wisdom is a model of the world, but must be wrong in some ways, simply because the world is far more complex than any model we could comprehend. Bed pans weren't brought to the tropics because they weren't needed, therefore their other uses were not discovered. Acting on what you think is a good idea, that nobody else does, can lead to success. (Plus Luck...)

In investing, contrarianism can work, because the market often over-reacts to bad news. By buying on bad news, you can come out ahead, especially if you also do some checking. For example, Warren Buffett bought American Express when it was involved in a fraudulent salad oil transaction. Because its business (of credit cards) was based on trust, it was thought this would be diastrous. But Buffett checked the local shopping center to see consumers still using it. Their daily habits weren't affected by the news. So he bought big, and made a(nother) fortune.

This is really interesting. I'm wondering if he was just sandbagging or at some point just figured out his own unique hustle with respect to his apparent intellectual deficiency. Definitely is now on my list of 'historical figures I would have liked to get drunk with'.